muskie

It doesn’t seem to be working in IE on Windows. Somebody said it was working fine but then I saw it on a friends computer… It also doesn’t work right in IE 5.2 for Mac. Same problem the SideBar is way at the bottom, I fooled around with some clears but maybe I didn’t come up with the right combo.

Could someone let me know if it is even fixable in IE 5.2 for Mac, I don’t have ready access to a Windows machine.

Thanks eveums, I assume you are on Windows. I don’t know if it validates. I could find out maybe later today. I always code with the standards in mind, but in my hacking sometimes little things go astray.

With the exception of the tabs which was code I didn’t come up with there is nothing fancy being done. I heavily modified the default theme. I still have some of his class names left but we use a different naming scheme. All the ones I’m actually styling with CSS were renamed my way. Anyone familiar with Kubrik shouldn’t have too much trouble figuring out what I did.

The sidebar is under revision. Technorati wanted some code snippet there so I did it but I don’t like how it displays so if I can’t get it tiddly boo it may be gone…

Muskie

It seems to work in Opera on Mac OS X. But some guy over on Arstechnica was trying to claim Opera wasn’t standards compliant, said I must not have done any web design before. I just directed him to my resume…

??

I wish I got to reply sooner. Regardless if it is a troll, that is a commonly expressed view. Too many people pirated a copy of Dreamweaver and called themselves web designers. I try to distance myself from that whole trend.

I’ve always coded by hand. I tried Dreamweaver when it first came out, went back to using the product Macromedia eventually bought from Allaire, the name has escaped me on Windows. When I’m on *Nix I use Nedit or even Pico in a hurry. CSS has been around since 1998-9 at least. Once people moved passed Netscape 4 and it’s buggy implementation it is a superior way to go than Dreamweaver, GoLive at least several versions ago, produces the ugliest HTML source I’ve ever seen.

I worked on no less than two custom content management solutions. The second of which has an elaborate customization template system, heck it was recently opensourced if you want to see https://www.gvcsitemaker.com/ I’m even going to write some sort of tutorial on translating templates between the two. You heard it hear first. WordPress has more templates but I made a few dozen for SiteMaker. SiteMaker had legacy issues especially on the menu and it was mandated by our main client that it had to support Netscape 4 on the Mac no less.

I managed to convert pretty much the entire company to the wonders of CSS and I got to put in CSS classes and ids into GVC.Sitemaker to make it more customizeable. Because WordPress made the correct decision and went with unordered list of links for navigation, they can do things like a horizontal menu which are impossible with tables, at least once the table structure is determined and “can not be changed”. That still seems to be on the ta-do list for GVC.SiteMaker.

Anyway I’ve gotten off track. On the Mac get BBEdit or if your cheap TextWrangler, or if you’re a Zeldman desciple get PageSpinner. For CSS there are some good general beginner tutorials online. I’ve even written one or two myself but I think they are all internal to various companies I’ve worked for. There is a style/template tutorial in the GVC.SiteMaker manual which is almost unchanged since I left. Most things with the UI seem to be done my way write down to the naming of a file as snazzy.css Good Old Uncle Ross always used that word so now it lives on…

Once you get the basics, classes, ids, box model, inherritance, I highly recommend Eric Meyer’s book, “Eric Meyer on CSS” there is a sequal now. A lot of the advanced techniques can be gleaned online at say https://www.alistapart.com/ but I learned a lot working through Eric’s book. I implemented many of his techniques as templates for a template gallery which I don’t even think exists anymore. So much of the work I did seems to have ended up undeployed as companies go out of business or there are big legal messes or whatever.

To conclude my deranged addition to this mess. You should have started learning CSS and HTML long before now if you are a “web designer”. No matter how good the tools get you will always need to look at the code and to do that you need to know how it works. For dynamic sites, be they PHP, WebObjects, WordPress, or GVC.SiteMaker in order to integrate the front end with the back end and the dynamicly generated with the staticly written you need to understand how webpages are actually written, parsed, and rendered. Dreamweaver/Photoshop table based image slicing monstrosity strongweb pagesstrong have been on the way out for a long time and I for one won’t miss them. Dynamicly generated, template based strongwebsitesstrong is the direction everyone is going. The days of everyone and anyone calling themselves a webdesigner are done, now you need some scripting ability, and knowledge of gasp emFTPem.

Of course FTP is integrated into most decent webdesign packages but a good stand alone FTP program is still worth the $20 bucks to register in my oppinion. Command lines have their uses, but dragging and dropping is superior I don’t care how fast you type.

Muskie

It took some trial and error but I got it working like I want.

Blog at https://blog.muschamp.ca/

And a sample permalink cleaned up

https://blog.muschamp.ca/2005/08/23/test/

The key seem to be getting everything just so.

1) Set up the subdomain first and make sure you update index.php not just copy it.
2) Put an empty .htaccess file there chmod to 666
3) Change your permalink structure and have WordPress generate the .htaccess code into your empty file.
4) Test and enjoy…

Muskie

Now to fix my template how I want and set up some categories etc. etc.

I finally got internet access at home and the time to take a look at this. Here are the error messsages I received without the follow symlink option added to the WordPress generated .htaccess file.

Warning: main(): Unable to access ./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php in /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/index.php on line 4

Warning: main(./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/index.php on line 4

Warning: main(): Unable to access ./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php in /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/index.php on line 4

Warning: main(./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/index.php on line 4

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/index.php on line 4

These errors appear to be because I removed the wordpress directory to simplify my domain structure and help my subdomain work better. Is it possible I can have either a nice domain structure and a working subdomain or nice permalinks?

OK so internet was down at home for the evening so I didn’t get to try it until today.

First thing I did was get rid of the /wordpress/ directory. Now my blog is at blog.muschamp.ca and my wordpress installation is there too.

Then I did some stuff, but I made progress when I created an empty .htaccess file and let WordPress write to it via changing the permisions to the mark of the beast. That got me some errors which I’d paste below but they are gone. I can reporduce them however.

When I look at what WordPress was doing different I noticed my .htaccess file was now one long line. So I added in the line to turn the following of symlinks on and got the Internal 500 error. I then got the last ten lines from my error logs:

[Thu Aug 25 11:10:19 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: <IfModule takes one argument, Container for directives based on existance of specified modules
[Thu Aug 25 11:10:19 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: <IfModule takes one argument, Container for directives based on existance of specified modules
[Thu Aug 25 11:10:19 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: <IfModule takes one argument, Container for directives based on existance of specified modules
[Thu Aug 25 11:10:19 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: <IfModule takes one argument, Container for directives based on existance of specified modules
[Thu Aug 25 11:13:00 2005] [error] [client 154.5.73.79] File does not exist: /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/favicon.ico
[Thu Aug 25 11:13:00 2005] [error] [client 154.5.73.79] File does not exist: /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/404.shtml
[Thu Aug 25 11:16:53 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: Illegal option RewriteEngine
[Thu Aug 25 11:16:53 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: Illegal option RewriteEngine
[Thu Aug 25 11:16:53 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: Illegal option RewriteEngine
[Thu Aug 25 11:16:53 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: Illegal option RewriteEngine

Now I’ll remove Options +FollowSymlinks upload and get the other errors again:

Or I would if I could… I’ll leave it busted this time rather than return it to non-pretty permilinks.

Muskie

You see I wan’t born yesterday, I knew what the problem was I just couldn’t fix it for a while. I finally found the setting in BBEdit and I changed it to Unix line breaks. I think because it was .css file and not a .html I haven’t created a brand new .css file in years I just edit the existing ones on my site. ??

Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out. It is good to know I wasn’t going insane last night. I swear I fixed the problem as soon as I started drinking my beer…

I did chmod to use the unix term my .htaccess file. I tried it both with and without the option followsymlinks addition. I’ll try 777 on the file.

The reason symlinks is off is so I could test some other things and slowly build the template I need to integrate it with the rest of my site. On my live server there is no .htaccess file in the blog directory (read subdomain) and I am using the default permalinks because in this configuration it works. IE the I can see my template changes in the browser.

One thing that drove me batty yesterday was some sort of rogue invisible character in my style.css I cut and pasted from a tutorial and no matter how many times I zapped gremlins or converted to ascii it would give WordPress fits. Eventually I had to copy over the default themes style.css and hack on it. I swear I have BBEdit set to create UNIX text files, does WordPress expect DOS, surely not?

I’ll do some more testing later today, right now I’m at work.

Muskie

I did chmod to use the unix term my .htaccess file. I tried it both with and without the option followsymlinks addition. I’ll try 777 on the file.

The reason symlinks is off is so I could test some other things and slowly build the template I need to integrate it with the rest of my site. On my live server there is no .htaccess file in the blog directory (read subdomain) and I am using the default permalinks because in this configuration it works. IE the I can see my template changes in the browser.

One thing that drove me batty yesterday was some sort of rogue invisible character in my style.css I cut and pasted from a tutorial and no matter how many times I zapped gremlins or converted to ascii it would give WordPress fits. Eventually I had to copy over the default themes style.css and hack on it. I swear I have BBEdit set to create UNIX text files, does WordPress expect DOS, surely not?

I’ll do some more testing later today, right now I’m at work.

Muskie

I’m in the process of setting up a blog. I had intended to use a subdomain such as blog.domain.com but I also likely the idea of cleaner more human readable permalinks. I’m not expert in .htaccess but from the little dicking I have done I get Internal Error 500 with the error log saying stuff like:

[Tue Aug 23 15:04:00 2005] [error] [client 154.5.73.79] File does not exist: /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/2005/08/23/test/
[Tue Aug 23 15:04:00 2005] [error] [client 154.5.73.79] File does not exist: /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/404.shtml
[Tue Aug 23 15:05:13 2005] [alert] [client 154.5.73.79] /home/muskie/domains/muschamp.ca/public_html/blog/.htaccess: <IfModule takes one argument, Container for directives based on existance of specified modules

I guess I can always go with the uglier permalinks, it is not like I have any in use, but I like the cleanliness of the URL and the directory structure of using the subdomain…

Muskie